Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday January 01, 2011 @02:12PM
from the i-blame-the-lack-of-flying-cars dept.

Harperdog sends this excerpt from Miller-McCune:
"A study (abstract) of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point. 'With talk of "peak oil," why not the possibility of "peak travel" when a clear plateau has been reached?' asked co-author Lee Schipper ... Most of the eight countries in the study have experienced declines in miles traveled by car per capita in recent years. The US appears to have peaked at an annual 8,100 miles by car per capita, and Japan is holding steady at 2,500 miles."

We simply either cant spend the money, wont spend the money or cant/wont approve new infrastructure projects that will ease the traffic burden. One prime example was ripping down the West Side Highway in NYC (instead of fixing or replacing it), and then "wondering" why congestion increased when "suddenly" the drivers who used to use the WSH are now on surface streets or migrating to the FDR drive.

Furthermore, the paradigm of "peak $thing" is not necessarily applicable to every fashionable $thing.
Travel is constrained by the carrying capacity of roads and junctions. If investment in these does not keep pace with demand for capacity, then the demand is throttled by the negative effects of congestion. As population density increases in some region, it becomes harder (disproportionately more expensive) to increase the carrying capacity of roads in proportion - the number of choke points increases and congestion increases. The low density exurbs have no such problem, except when it comes to commuting to a high density downtown...

As population density increases in some region, it becomes harder (disproportionately more expensive) to increase the carrying capacity of roads in proportion

This is true. However, a conclusion that sprawl is cheaper to maintain would be wildly inaccurate.

I spent some time reviewing alternatives for the Austin Comprehensive Plan [imagineaustin.net] -- discussing zoning, city layout, pollution levels, cost to build and maintain roads, man-hours and funds wasted by commuting, and the like for several different development scenarios. The high-density, compact city was not only environmentally preferable -- it was by far the most economically efficient way to manage our anticipated growth.

Increasing capacity of existing roads (while still keeping them focused around single-occupancy vehicles) is inordinately expensive, yes. On the other hand, planning a compact, high-density city that puts people in walking or cycling distance of their work, schools and shopping avoids creation of those vehicle-miles altogether -- and creates a more livable, healthier city to boot.

Kind of goes against the current trend of people moving to suburbs though, don't it?

Running projections for "current trends", and then comparing them to the economic, environmental, &c. projections for where you could be if you took actions to modify those trends, and then using those projections to decide on and take concrete actions is, ya know, kind of what that whole long-term city planning thing is all about.

While you're (hopefully) still here, can you shed any light on the persistent urban legend we Austinites have regarding the city planners in the 90s intentionally keeping the major arteries of Mopac, 360, and I35 shitty in order to discourage people from moving to Austin and in hopes of keeping ATX small? (Obviously they failed miserably in everything except making commuting nearly unbearable).

I would much rather live in a proper city (they're not all slums) than a suburb or exurb. I hate being tied to a huge hulk of oil-gobbling pollution-spewing metal that I must take everywhere I go (and always be sober to do so), with so much land being dedicated to the storage of said hulks of metal at every destination (you say you don't like concrete -- do you like asphalt?). Unfortunately, the city I live in (Austin, but it applies in much of the US) has zoned mostly low density and thus high density areas are expensive due to limited supply relative to demand, and jobs are scattered in the suburbs, so I'm stuck with the car.

If you like your exurb (but apparently not the one you work in, since you feel the need to commute), fine, but don't complain about gas tax increases or other driving charges to pay for your highways and to keep CO2 and oil consumption under control. Don't complain if you get charged higher utility rates than urban customers because you need more pipe/wire distance per person. Don't complain if more of your local taxes have to be spent on police and fire coverage to cover the same number of people. Don't complain if state/federal tax money is spent on the more efficient population centers, particularly for things like transit. Don't complain that natural gas/electricity has to be kept cheap so you can heat/cool your large detached house.

Unfortunately, the city I live in (Austin, but it applies in much of the US) has zoned mostly low density and thus high density areas are expensive due to limited supply relative to demand, and jobs are scattered in the suburbs, so I'm stuck with the car.

Howdy, neighbor!

I recently moved from up around Lamar and Rundberg (still own a house there -- renting it out until the market gets better) down to the new (built in 2005) condos on East 6th and Pedernales.

It's a great place -- big gated courtyard (the dog has more room to run than he did in the backyard of the house), cheap to maintain ($176/mo HOA fee includes everything but electricity -- Internet, gas, water, waste, maintenance, etc -- and my electric bill is down by more than that $176/mo)... and the walls are thick enough that when I ask my neighbors if my dog barking annoyed them, they tell me they couldn't hear a thing. (I'm inclined to believe them -- they also own dogs, and I never hear their pets bark except from the hall... so either everyone but me has a silent pet, or we have really good noise insulation). Right now I commute by bicycle (or the train, if I'm feeling lazy) to work up around Northcross and Anderson (~9 miles each way), but I have a few friends with jobs in the middle of downtown, so there's a very good chance that next time I'm looking for work I'll be able to find something with a short east-west commute.

More to the point, though -- it was cheap. Sure, the new square-downtown highrise buildings are as expensive as you'd expect -- and sure, East 6th used to be the ghetto -- but it's totally possible to buy a place "downtown enough" for under $150K.

Of course, I don't know your circumstances -- for me, it was resigning from Dell that freed me to move here -- but the point is that if you haven't even looked at whether there's anything downtown because you're expecting everything to run $400K+... go ahead and look again. You might be surprised.

>>>don't complain about gas tax increases or other driving charges to pay for your highways

I don't. In fact I think gas taxes should increase, in order to fix all the bridges that are on the verge of collapse (see the Minneapolis bridge). As for my exurb I get to look out my window and see trees and cows (in the distance) and other wildlife like birds, squirrels, chipmunks, etc. M

Note that you should WANT all those people living in those dense alleged hell holes, to ride bikes, take mass transit, etc, so as to keep the prices low enough for you to continue living in the boonies.

Oil consumption will at some point be self-regulating by insufficient supply -- but simply letting that happen on its own schedule would be more disruptive than gradually weaning ourselves off of it, using the revenue raised to accelerate development of alternatives and mitigations, saving more of it for the most important uses later on. Who are you to tell future generations (or the less wasteful members of the current generation, for that matter) that it's our right to suck the oil out as fast as we can?

Huh. See, I'm sitting here in a high-owner-occupancy-percentage gated condo in downtown Austin with 14-foot ceilings, outstanding noise isolation, a big courtyard to play with the dog, a enjoyable daily workout by doing my commute by bike... and I'm pretty damned happy with my quality of life.

We may not have to live that way, but we Americans are subsidizing the opposite, sprawl-generating suburban lifestyle. While I might want to live with a nice yard and big house, I don't think that anyone should subsidize my choice.

You've obviously never been to Europe or any major American city. They already live like that and like it. There are about two million people living on the island of Manhattan. Obviously, your opinion presented as fact is wrong.

City planners never account for quality of life.

Again, you are asserting your incorrect opinion as fact. They do take it into account, and your lies to the contrary won't change that.

I don't like tight spaces or concrete.

Ah, the typical Neo-Con. Anything you like is what everyone else should like. Everyone else is wrong. Anyone who hold another opinion is wrong and should be dismissed. Just because you don't like city living doesn't mean no one else does, as you asserted. And you lie about city planners in order to further push your agenda.

A non-trivial number of us must want to live in cities, else real estate there would be cheaper. If you look at census data for blobs-O-people (50K units, or larger), a minimum of 1/3 of the US population lives in density greater than or equal to 2000 people per square mile. (This is a minimum, because the 25,000 people living in my town, are not counted, nor are people living in nearby, dense, sub-50K towns.) 2000 per square mile is Lexington, MA, complete with office parks etc. It might not be that dense. It is, however, the density of Assen in the Netherlands, where they manage a bicycle trip share of 40% -- so it's clearly dense enough for many people to get out of their cars.

You can also find other versions of this data at gapminder.org [gapminder.org]. Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban").

We used to drive our cars to many cities before in Europe for short vacations. (Paris, Brussels, Rome etc) The increased traffic takes all the fun out of it, not to mention the highway tolls, the parking fees at the destination...Now I use Ryanair or similar to fly there for a few bucks. Ditto for the TGV where it makes sense.Makes a ton of difference in my yearly Kms.

Which will work fine until oil is at $120-150/barrel, and you're spending a non-negligible amount on fuel for commuting and can't afford your mortgage and food.

Nonsense. Oil already hit $120 a few years back, and I don't know anyone who had to chose between commuting and traveling. Even if it hits $200 per barrel 5 years from now, my car will be ready for replacement, and I can buy another one which uses half as much fuel.

There are billions of people between India and China who are going to be driving soon. And who will be using oil to do so. Don't kid yourself, the suburbs are unsustainable.

Yes, billions of people in India and China will be able to afford $150/barrel fuel, but people in first world nations won't. Nice logic there.

Yes, billions of people in India and China will be able to afford $150/barrel fuel, but people in first world nations won't. Nice logic there.

China already heavily subsidizes oil imports. Also, Americans need far more oil per capita vs third world citizens. If it costs them several dollars to fill their scooter, it's painful. If it costs you $150 to fill your car, it's crippling for the majority.

Nonsense. Oil already hit $120 a few years back, and I don't know anyone who had to chose between commuting and traveling. Even if it hits $200 per barrel 5 years from now, my car will be ready for replacement, and I can buy another one which uses half as much fuel.

Just so I'm clear on this... Your solution to "Fuel is getting more expensive, at some point I may not be able to commute" will be "I need to buy a new car".

The trend here is the exact opposite, and our fuel costs more. I dunno what the average income is in Chicago, but if a 30% increase in fuel prices led to a 70% decline in suburb property values

As I said, the decrease in property values is not inside Chicago, but out in the 'burbs. The average adjusted gross income in my zip code appears to be about $75k according to incometaxlist.com. The mean is much higher I think, since there are nearly 700 returns (none of them mine) filed here where people have incom

The problem with your logic is this: Those billions in India and China are A.- In the third world where anything more powerful than the moped powered quadracycle will cost more than a year's wages, and B.-Due to all the jobs being in highly packed urban centers it will be cheaper and more efficient for them to simply take the bus/rail which a good portion of the USA simply doesn't have and is doubtful they will be getting any real public transport anytime soon, since we are big on "government is bad" ATM an

In the last couple of decades inner cities have become pretty nice for the most par. Most major citiesl have clean, low crime cores nowadays due to redevelopment and the fact that people don't like to drive an hour or more to get to work or anywhere with more culture than a Supercuts in a stripmall. Of course, that goes along with high rent. Where I am (Seattle) it's the suburbs that are trashy and have crime problems. I can certainly walk out my door at any time of night (and I often do) with no problems.

and a decent yard between us and noisy neighbors who don't share my sleep cycle. Much better to sit in traffic a bit than to live in some city center.

I feel obliged to note here:

while most apartments are cheap as hell and you don't notice this, it is perfectly possible to design apartment buildings so the noise factor (from neighbors) is not an issue. While I've lived in a lot of worse places since, when I lived in Boston, one of my neighbors was a professional violin player, who practiced a great deal, but his playing could only be heard in the hall, not from neighboring units. It was actually almost a problem.... the noise insulation was so good, that the FIRE ALARM went off in the hall, and I could barely hear it in my bedroom.

Sadly, the noise insulation from the outside was not as good, but that was because it didn't have modern windows (which is an easy thing to do in a modern building)

Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with you. But I felt obliged to note that it IS possible to make an apartment building which gives its tenants privacy, even if only so that people would know to look for one if they're stuck in the city.

I'm familiar with the details of the bond issue you spoke of -- "familiar with the details" meaning that I actually went down the line items and read up on exactly what they propose. Your third paragraph has a few half-truths -- but is mostly full of outright lies. Example: Nothing in the bond issue creates bicycle-only streets -- for that matter, even the failed "bike boulevard" plan wouldn't have created bicycle-only streets.

The reason city planners are less enthusiastic about self-driving smart cars, is that these have not actually been shown to work in the field (e.g., Boston), and "smart cars" don't do that much for reducing GHG emissions, nor do they do that much for parking problems (*), nor do they do much for the constraints of "peak oil" (or rather, expensive oil). (*) When you're the one guy with a smart car that knows where the empty slots are, they help you with parking. When everyone has a smart car, all the parki

Manhattan is, in general, very well serviced as long as you live below 110th Street. North of that, things get a bit dicey as it can take nearly an hour to go from 207th Street to Times Square/42nd street on the 1 train due to lack of express trains along that line. (They shouldn't have dropped the 9 train, IMO!) Also, the further north you go, the more affordable housing is but also the less "nice" the area is.

Skyscrapers are abundant below 59th Street (the southern border of Central Park) and then the bui

Manhattan is a case study of a city full of rich people. If you're not one of the rich people working in the fashion or finance industries, and instead have to work a working-class job like cleaning the toilets for one of the nice Manhattan offices, you're relegated to a slum in one of the other boroughs and have to commute in by train every day.

It's not that hard to have a really nice, dense, and safe non-slum city when you move all the poorest people (who do all the shit jobs) out of the city and force them to commute.

Yes, simple economics have driven the poor people out. But to proclaim Manhattan as some kind of shining example of a perfect city is just wrong, when all the people needed to support the city don't even live there. You need to look at NYC as a whole, and not just the one district where all the millionaires live. There's slums in NYC, just not on Manhattan island.

OK, I have an objection. Why do all these planned communities cost so fucking much? Europe got cities that are inhospitable to cars by building them before the invention of the car. We want to get them by spending even more money than you'd spend on cars, and designing them for cars.

The basic root problem to me is that living in the city implies a lower quality of life than living in the country. I need more space to swing my arms. I feel stifled by the masses of asses coated with toxic perfumes and filled

The counter point is that as the density increases, I don't have to drive as far to get what I want. I now generally walk to the grocery store. It is literally "in my backyard" and it is easier to just walk over there than it is to drive, find a parking space, and then walk the rest of the way.

We simply either cant spend the money, wont spend the money or cant/wont approve new infrastructure projects that will ease the traffic burden.

Well perhaps an alternative view of Peak Car (the article was focused almost solely on car and had very little to say about other means of travel), is that public infrastructure IS finally getting attention in many cities to the point where car ownership and driving is not necessary.

Perhaps not in your example from NYC, but in many other places public transit has become responsive, cheap, and frequent enough that people are shifting their priorities. Seattle installed lite rail over the last several year,

I'm not so sure. Ive always heard that the disadvantage of long commutes to most people is the time wasted rather than the money. Anecdotally, I chose to ride the bus rather than drive to work primarily because our parking situation is terrible and requires a longer walk and makes my whole commute quite a bit longer. The bus is quicker and less stressful . The fact that I only drive ~150 miles a month and spend almost no money on gas is just a nice secondary effect in my mind.

How(if at all) they are factoring in all the trucks delivering the stuff that I would historically have had to drive a car to the store to obtain...

A shift in the US from suburban material culture, where car transport is essentially necessary, and that necessity is self-perpetuating through the cultural and infrastructure spending priorities it creates, would be big news.

A shift from buying at bestbuy to buying at bestbuy.com might well drive down the number of car-hours/year; but would be fairly uninteresting. Ditto with things like Netflix and Amazon and pay-per-view cable movies and whatnot...

That's not entirely apt. It used to be that groceries would be delivered by the grocer, you'd stop by select what you wanted and they'd deliver it for you. Back up until the affluence of the 60s or so, it was typical for families to only own one car.

I suspect the bigger factor was that people didn't buy as much stuff and expected it to last longer. These days it's a challenge, as there's low end and high end stuff available. It can be a real challenge to find things which are midranged in terms of both p

Forget that - buy high end stuff (for durability, quality) and just buy slower; you'll spend less over time because you won't replace what you buy, and you'll find that you really don't need half of it in the first place.

Well there's also a point where you can only spend so much time in a day travelling before you move to reduce travelling. I think on an individual basis that may vary a lot, but there's probably a plateau'd statistical average (maybe 2 hours? not sure). Since speed limits haven't increased dramatically (and as congestion increases traffic speed overall goes down), the distance travelled will eventually peak, until you alleviate congestion or otherwise increase the speed of travel. That would be for sort

Japan has better transit, so you could, for instance, spend most of your travel time on a train, and it's possible that japanese people largely use cars for weekend trips (far out modders also push the average down - if you've added a 10 foot fiberglass rear bumper to your van (no lie!), you probably don't drive it much).

I'd like to look at it as a holistic transport problem - how do you move people in volume with the minimum time per passenger? This is different from GM's thing, as cars are not required, a

In sufficiently dense areas, you basically face the choice between building "mass transit" for cars or mass transit for people. (Obviously, the cars don't literally get put onto trains or anything; but bridges, tunnels, overpasses, underpasses, specialized high-density parking garages, and the like are, in terms of capital expenditure, urban planning, use of eminent domain, and so forth, more similiar to 'mass transit' than they are to your ordinary suburban road system).

"Peak-gate"
The outrageous scandal of uh, something vague maybe, or nothing much really, we're not actually sure about it, and might have made it up completely... but it's coming to your TV screen tonight!

A lot of work that used to require physical presence can now be done remotely. Not necessarily from home, but from computers at an office that doesn't have to be located at the site where the machine is. So offices move to where the people are rather than making people move to where the materials are. So you don't have to move groceries for those people as far either. Facetime, remote, telepresence will take over travel per capita as tech improves.

Here in Florida, the trend seems to be to move offices away from areas close to most office workers' modest homes, to office parks near areas with McMansions and golf courses for the richies at the top -- and no place affordable for the bulk of the workers to live. Then come demands to county officials to widen roads and put in new ones, add bus lines, etc.

With a major job shortage right now, the richies aren't worried about workers leaving them. And never forget: lots of people in Mumbai will happily commu

A lot of work that used to require physical presence can now be done remotely. Not necessarily from home, but from computers at an office that doesn't have to be located at the site where the machine is. So offices move to where the people are rather than making people move to where the materials are. So you don't have to move groceries for those people as far either. Facetime, remote, telepresence will take over travel per capita as tech improves.

Some of the stuff you're talking about can indeed be done remotely, but there's always a need for actual face-to-face meetings. People still go to conferences instead of just posting on a website, deals are still struck with a handshake (requiring a long flight) rather than just exchanging emails/videochat. There's certain things about doing business that are hard to turn into a stream of bits, chiefly the attainment of trust. People are reluctant to trust someone they haven't met, even if all the relevant

Few people spend more than 1 and 2 hours a day traveling, unless their work itself is moving themselves or stuff around. So as speeds max out, so does travel.

Both car travel and air travel have slowed down. Even subsonic jets used to fly faster, but the fuel consumption goes up as Mach 1 is approached. Airport time is much longer than it used to be. Road capacity maxes out at 35MPH; faster, and the cars are spaced out more, so vehicles per minute drops. (California uses metering lights to try to keep freeways at 35MPH under heavy load. Japan just sets low speed limits on urban expressways.)

And, of course, we have such good communications that going somewhere merely to talk to someone is rarely necessary.

There's that, but I think the bigger issue is that the transit options really haven't grown proportionally to the growth of the population.

Here in Seattle, for example, we still don't have a real mass transit system. Metro insists on taking half of it's bus routes through the down town corridor for reasons which make sense to nobody outside of their planning committee. Meaning that if you're not going downtown you're almost certainly going to need to make a transfer. Good luck going east or west or aroun

3. A general drastic shift in income towards the more wealthy at the cost of growth in other income levels has minimized the ability for most folks to have the opportunity for leisure travel (time as much as money).

Those create a trend - but there's no inherent "peak travel" there. Start electing folks who will tax wealth in order to give meaningful freedom to everyone else again (see: 1940's to 1970's US), and you will see more frequent travel again as people have resources to start businesses, engage in leisure activities, and do more than just go to WalMart every long once in a while, rather than a few rich having exponential increases.

People have more leisure time then they've ever had. When they were farmers they worked 6 days a week (minus sundays) and often from sunup to sundown. Now they work just 5 days a week and 8-10 hours a day. Hence they have free time to watch TV in the evenings, or to travel to the beach on the weekend, something our pre-1930s ancestors never dreamed of.

If driving has hit a plateau since 2000, maybe it's because people simply don't want to. I know I have no desire to hop in my car and drive to the store, when I can just click netflix.com to watch a video, or shop amazon.com and have it delivered to me. I don't even visit the bank now - I just do it all on the internet from the comfort of my chair.

I can afford to drive my 460 c.i. Ford truck most anywhere I care to, but that's mostly fucking WORK, not fun. Modern technology allows ME to command stuff be brought to ME at MY convenience, freeing time for ME to do what _I_ wish.

Interesting how you go from the pre-30s straight to today, conveniently missing out the era when people had working hours similar to today yet before women were expected to work the same as men. I wonder what it'd look like if you plotted a graph of hours worked per year per household over the last century.

This rant (most definitely a rant) is USA-centric and brings up several points that people don't want to think about. If that distresses you, you may wish to skip it.

Sorry, but a government that taxes the wealthy for the benefit of the majority is not going to happen. I'm afraid that sociologically, we may have hit a "tipping point" where the wealthy elite have taken control of the government/energy corporations (Illuminati for all you conspiracy theorists out there), and are driving the economy and public

Ever since the time that gasoline hit $4 here in the US, I've been keeping an eye on the DOT's Traffic Volume Trends [dot.gov]. It seems to me that, once Americans realized how much gas could cost (and will permanently cost, eventually), they also realized how much auto travel is superfluous. In particular This chart of the 12-month average for all roads [dot.gov] shows a clear pullback in miles driven. Perhaps some of this could be attributable to people being more efficient in their travel; taking care of multiple errands at once, using public transportation much more, etc. Certainly the downturn in the economy has an impact, too.

Superfluous? Maybe in the big city, but out in the sticks, or towns, it's necessary. I used to get the train to work, but as they were either (1) late, sometimes making me stand on the windy, cold platform for upwards of 2 hours, or (2) rammed full, so I couldn't get myself and my bicycle onto them, I ended up buying a car and now drive to and from work. I didn't drive before!

You want to live in the sticks and still have an urban lifestyle (i.e. frequent access to the rest of civilization), you get to pay the costs of the dwindling resources that lifestyle consumes. As for small towns, the core of them is usually pretty walkable, but they've sprawled out with the automobile just as the larger cities have.

I'm sorry to hear about the poor train service you have -- but that's a local issue that needs to be taken up with the transit agency (and/or the politicians who are probably s

Yea, they've been kind-of taking it up for the last 50 years here in the UK. Still no solution in sight. Prices are sky-high, carriages are cramped, trains are often late. Services are cancelled at short notice, because the company gets fined if a train is late (!).

I live in a small town, and the "core" area has very little in the way of shops that you need to live; there's no grocery store in the old, walkable, part of town. Outside of about a 1-2 mile strip, there's no sidewalks. Most people never go into the old part of town except for official business; the court house, police station, tax people, etc. are all in one spot.

When gas gets too expensive, people consider it when they buy their home. If they must live far away, they focus on carpooling and jobs where working from home is allowed. I was able to work from home 7 months last year one day a week and it cut my mileage by 40 miles a week (about 16% per year).

In the US and Canada for example, driving will peak based on how far you need to go to get things done. Two things have changed on that front, first being that things are closer. An example, 10 years ago if I wanted to go to a store like walmart I would have had to drive 30mins, it's 3minutes now. Same with a Canadian tire, but the size of my city has only grown by 5k people. The thing that really throws a wrench into this of course is if live out in the middle of nowhere Canada or US. In which case driving 2-4hrs twice a month to buy your groceries is still the norm, that's providing it's not dropped off by plane. Even having things dropped off by plane is getting scarce however, it's cheaper to do 5 months of deliveries by truck in the dead of winter for remote cities.

In most other places, notably japan unless you have the money to pay for private parking when you go to work you'll live the life of the 2hr rush, and be packed in, and leave your car at home. But everything you more than likely need is in walking or biking distance, and when it isn't you can get just about everything sent to your home. Sure that's happening in north america albeit at a slower pace. Japan can't dedicate space to roads, we can. Which leads japan to having more dedication to public transportation.

Personally to me it comes down to the whole space vs no space issue. We're not short on room in north america not even close. The only upper limit you have to that here, is the amount of space you can dedicate to roadways to ease conjestion.

We travel to see stuff. Modern media has made much of that superfluous.

We travel to get stuff. Having stuff show up is less time wasted. Instead of going to buy tools, for example, I shop online and they show up. I can mix Ebay, Craigslist, and new vendors while I fap to pr0n and surf Slashdot.

We travel to see people. It's now more convenient to chat with a world of friends without bothering to meet in person very often.

We travel to see stuff. Modern media has made much of that superfluous.

We travel to get stuff. Having stuff show up is less time wasted. Instead of going to buy tools, for example, I shop online and they show up. I can mix Ebay, Craigslist, and new vendors while I fap to pr0n and surf Slashdot.

We travel to see people. It's now more convenient to chat with a world of friends without bothering to meet in person very often.

Peak travel is an interesting concept but it applies only to a given technology level. My own situation is an example. I live in Texas and have family on both the East and West coast of the US. I would also like to vacation in Florida, Maine, and Northern California. But with 2 small children and the TSA increasingly repressive, I simply don't travel much beyond a one-day driving distance.

That would change instantly if fast, harassment-free transportation were available. That used to be the airlines, and it could be fast rail if it weren't for the fact that excessive govt regulation and problems getting right-of-way means that it will never happen. But we're one transportation revolution away from me making coast to coast travel plans fairly often, because that is where I would want to go if there were reasonable transportation options.

I can't be the only one who doesn't go anywhere beyond a 1-day drive anymore, either. If we're at a transportation peak, it is because of artificial suppression of travel due to airport harassment and because of other concerns that could be addressed by the availability of fast and easy transportation. Note that I don't mention cost - I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for quick and hassle free transportation around the country, but it simply can't be done right now.

As a nation, we're quickly heading towards loserville when we can't even manage to use available technology to let people travel freely without harassment. Car, train, and aircraft technology are all available to allow for reasonably rapid transportation, but our car speed limits are where they were 30 years ago, there is still very limited train service in most central and western states, and the govt is doing its best to harass people out of flying commercial air. We suck, and we're doing it to ourselves.

... it could be fast rail if it weren't for the fact that excessive govt regulation [emphasis added] and problems getting right-of-way means that it will never happen...

Come again? Since every high speed rail system in the world has been built by using large government subsidies (just like the original U.S. transcontinental rail system), and usually at least a government partnership if not as an outright government-run project, how is "excessive government regulation" to blame for the lack of high speed rail? Note also that those rights-of-way can only be obtained only through the government exercising its right of eminent domain.

The US is in the pockets of corporations and the corporations don't want rail. Big Auto actually bought and shut down profitable, working rail lines, and kept operating only the freight lines; and indeed, they shut down some of those, although those which feed auto plants are all still operating. There is in fact substantial rail which can be compared to dark fiber; a deal of it needs little more than testing before it can be reused. Oh sure, you're not getting high-speed travel on the existing rails, but t

By excessive govt regulation I am talking about the mounds of paperwork required by a variety of different government agencies, none of whom coordinate with each other, in order to get approval to do anything.

Don't take this as being anti-environment, but the example of environmental impact assessments alone is enough to kill most projects that take up only a single location, let alone a rail or road project that will cut through maybe hundreds of different environmental regions....

First off, it is debatable whether U.S. regulations are actually more onerous than in other nations where fast rail actually get built given that supposedly anti-regulation, corporate friendly administrations been in charge 8 of the last 10 years, and 20 years out of the last 30. Nations outside of China have these sorts of regulations and agencies also (much, much worse in fact to hear Republicans talk about them) yet fast rail gets built there.

A study of eight horse-using countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more horses, and more riding — came to a halt in the early years of the 20th century, well before the recent escalation in fodder prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for horse ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point. 'With talk of "peak manure," why not the possibility of "peak travel" when a clear plateau has been reached?' asked co-author Jebediah Schipper... Most of the eight countries in the study have experienced declines in miles traveled by horse per capita in recent years. The US appears to have peaked at an annual 1620 miles by horse per capita, and Japan is holding steady at 500 miles."

i love that i have telecommuted since 1997 by using the 'net; after retiring in 2005, the wife now telecommutes daily - walks to the home office in flip-flops, flips open the laptop, and goes to work in DC next to Union Station near Capitol Hill...

life is good! and for my marketing, i take my Specialized Rockhopper and messenger bag to the local farmer's market...

Interesting that travel dropped right about the time we really geared up the subsidized food burning. [healthandenergy.com]

Funny how historically high food prices and pitiful job and income growth can really dampen a decade. That's without mentioning gas prices. "Peak Travel" you say?? Whoever came up with this Peak Travel idea must live in vacuum.

"Peak Oil", is a worthless flawed concept to begin with. Gauging how much oil exists based on how much we CHOOSE to pump isn't even starting to take reality into consideration. If there were no huge multinational interests trying to control gas prices, "Peak Oil" would be flawed to the point of being worthless. The fact that there ARE huge multinational interests involved in oil price manipulation means that "Peak Oil" is just a stupid idea.

"Peak travel" on the other hand could have some validity. Depending on what they are measuring for "Peak". If they are measuring it in time spent travelling. Obviously there is a hard limit on the number of hours that can be traveled. Just count the number of people on the planet, and multiply by 24 hours.

If it takes more than one barrel of oil to extract, one barrel of oil from the ground, you have a metric that is worth discussing. "Peak Oil" is NOT the discussion of how much oil it takes to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. Peak oil is the discussion of how much oil is in the ground, measured by how much we CHOOSE to pump in a year.

If the article is speaking of distance traveled, then my comment has no bearing. I specifically said "If they are measuring it in time spent travelling." because I did not know that the article was measuring distance.

Of course, once I submitted, I realized someone would point out that changing population number would still change the limit on the number of hours that could be spent traveling.

The whole thing falls apart though, if they do like they do with "Peak Oil" and try to calculate how many mile

In China, though, travel is going way up. Their National Trunk Highway System, very similar in road design to the US Interstate system, is up to 74,000 km and adding about 10,000 km per year, all built since 1988. That may do for China what the Interstate system did for the US - pull the country much closer together. China has historically had weak inter-provincial links and restrictions on inter-provincial trade. There are still trade barriers between provinces. Most provinces have their own auto manuf

I know one of the perhaps 20 industrialized countries in the Worl has an obsession with cars; but less cars means less travel? I say non sequitur. Ever heard of trains and planes?
Also, the 8k miles/car/capita in USA vs 2k in Japan is meaningless: in Japan you never need to travel very far because it is smaller and has a higher density.

Clearly it stands to reason that if we have hit peak oil (the rate of oil production), the refineries are not becomming more efficient and if the efficiency of vehicles is not really significantly increasing, then the miles the vehicles travel have also peaked.
* World oil production - 86 million barrels per day (Mbpd) - This has been pretty flat over the last five years.
* US consumption of world oil - The US consumes around 1/4 of the world's oil. Due to the decline in the economy, US oil consumption h

I know that there has been a lot of re-urbanization in North America; where people are moving back into the cities from the suburbs. People are realizing that there are actually benefits to living in a city. That and people wanting to live closer to work. I'm not sure how much that figures in. I know after a while, travel gets old. Even an extra half hour a day is a half hour that is not yours.